Vector Advanced Metering Services (Australia) PTY LTD (trading as Vector Energy) ("Vector Energy") and its related entities (we, our, us) is committed to protecting our customers' personal information. We have created this privacy policy to help you understand how we collect, use and protect your information when you visit our websites and use our products and services.

This privacy policy covers the following topics:

What information do we collect?

How do we use your information?

Sharing your information

Protecting your information

Accessing and updating your information

Internet use

Destruction of your information

Changes to our Privacy Statement

This Statement is provided for your information and doesn't limit or exclude your rights under the Privacy Act 1988.

1. What information does Vector Energy collect?

We collect information relating to you that you have provided to us (for example, on our registration form, through the way you use our products and services, when you enter a competition or promotion, or that we may have obtained from another source (such as from our field service providers and contractors)).

The information may include your name, address, telephone number(s), information on how you use our products and services, and anything we need to provide these products or services to you. We may also monitor and record your calls to us and our calls to you.

We collect personal information about you when:

It is necessary to provide goods or services you have requested;

You have expressly consented to us collecting that information;

It is necessary to protect or enforce our legal rights or interests, or to defend any claims made against us by any person (including you); or,

It is required by law.

Where possible, we will collect the information directly from you.

However the method of collecting this information, we may collect information about you from third parties, for example from our contractors, data providers or credit reporting bodies. Where these third parties act on our behalf, we ask that they hold, use and disclose your personal information in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988.

We also use CCTV cameras to record footage at some of our sites. This footage may constitute ‘personal information' as defined in the Privacy Act 1988.

2. How does Vector Energy use your information?

The information that we collect from you may be used by us for a number of purposes connected with our business such as:

Dealing with your requests, enquiries or complaints and other customer care related activities;

Informing you about special offers or promotions that are relevant to your relationship with us;

Carrying out any activity in connection with a legal, governmental or regulatory requirement on us or in connection with legal proceedings, crime or fraud prevention, detection or prosecution;

Carrying out activities connected with the running of our business such as personnel training, quality control, network monitoring, testing and maintenance of computer and other systems and in connection with the transfer of any part of our business in respect of which you are a customer or a potential customer; or

Anyone who hosts or maintains data centres, service platforms and other infrastructure and systems on behalf of us and our group companies, where your information is processed;

Third parties as explicitly requested by you; or

Any person or organisation as authorised by the Privacy Act 1988.

Otherwise, we will only disclose your personal information without your consent if doing so is:

Necessary to protect or enforce our legal rights or interests, or to defend any claims made against us by any person (including you);

Necessary to lessen a serious threat to a person's health or safety; or

Required by law.

4. Protecting and storing your personal information

We will take all reasonable steps to ensure that the personal information we collect, use or disclose is accurate, complete, up to date. and stored in a secure environment.

Most of the personal information we collect is stored electronically in our computer network. However, some personal information will be held in physical files at our offices located in Australia. We have reasonable security precautions in place, including user identifications and access passwords, to assist us in protecting your information from unauthorised access, modification and disclosure.

In circumstances where we transfer, process or store your information overseas, we will take reasonable steps to ensure that the overseas recipient handles your personal information in accordance with the Privacy Act 1988.

Where you have a password, which enables you to access our website, you are responsible for keeping this password secure and confidential.

CCTV footage will usually be retained for a period of 30 days, after which time it will be deleted, unless required by law enforcement authorities.

5. Credit Reporting

As part of our service to you, we may collect, hold, use and disclose credit related information about you. We collect this information from credit reporting bodies from time to time. We use your credit related information for the following purposes:

managing your account;

collecting payments that you owe us;

debt collecting

We will securely store all credit related information in accordance with this policy, as permitted by the Privacy Act 1988.

6. Accessing and updating your personal information

You may request access to the personal information we hold about you by sending an email to privacy@vectorenergy.com.au. Please quote your name and address. We would be grateful if you could also provide brief details of what information you want a copy of (this helps us to more readily locate your data).

In some cases, there may be a charge associated with providing copies of your personal information to you. If so, we will advise you of this prior to sending your information to you.

We will not be able to provide your personal information if we do not know or don't have reasonable grounds to believe it is personal information about you or if disclosing the information would involve the unwarranted disclosure of the affairs of another individual.

You can request correction or amendment of the information held by us at any time and as often as necessary by sending us an email to privacy@vectorenergy.com.au and specifying the information that you require changed. If it is reasonable in the circumstances for us to do so, we will make the requested change or correction, otherwise we'll take reasonable steps to mark that information as having been subject to a change or correction request.

We will never ask you for your password in an unsolicited phone call or in an unsolicited email. Also, if you are using the internet, remember to sign out of your account and close your browser window when you have finished. This is to ensure that others cannot access your personal information and correspondence if you share a computer with someone else or are using a computer in a public place.

7. Internet use

We make every effort to maintain the security of our internet connections; however for reasons outside of our control, security risks may still arise. Any personal information transmitted to us or from our online products or services will therefore be at your own risk, however we will use our best efforts to ensure that any such information remains secure.

We may use cookies and other interactive techniques such as web beacons to collect non-personal information about how you interact with our website, and web-related products and services, to:

Understand what you like and use about our website;

Understand what you do not like and do not use on our website;

Provide a more enjoyable, customised service and experience;

Enable you to use certain services on our website; and,

Help us develop and deliver better products and services tailored to our customers' interests and needs.

We also collect IP addresses. IP addresses are assigned to computers on the internet to uniquely identify them within the global network. We collect and manage IP addresses as part of the service of providing internet session management and for security purposes.

We may use a persistent cookie to record details such as a unique user identity and general registration details on your PC. This helps us recognise you on subsequent visits to this website so that you don't have to re-enter your registration details each time you visit us and allows us to carry out the activities mentioned above.

Most browser technology (such as Internet Explorer, Chrome etc) allows you to choose whether to accept cookies or not – you can either refuse all cookies or you can set your browser to alert you each time that a website tries to set a cookie. You do not need to have cookies turned on to access our sites, but you may need them for customisable areas of the site that we may develop in the future, or to access and benefit from certain functionality offered by the site.

8. Destruction of your information

We take all reasonable steps to ensure your personal information is appropriately disposed of once it is no longer needed for the purpose for which it was collected.

9. Questions about this privacy policy

This privacy policy is maintained by Vector Energy. If you have a question, concern or complaint about this privacy policy or our handling of your information, you can contact us by email on privacy@vectorenergy.com.au.

10. Changes to our privacy policy

We may change this privacy policy from time to time and we will tell you about a change in the policy by posting an updated policy on our website. Any change we make applies from the date we post it on the website.